Conclusion

Knowledge infrastructures are robust internetworks of
people, artifacts, and institutions which generate, share, and maintain
specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds.

Like all
infrastructures, they are composed of many systems and networks, each with its
own unique dynamics. Because shared, reliable knowledge is among human society’s
most precious resources, the institutional elements of knowledge
infrastructures – such as universities, libraries, and scientific societies –
have typically adopted conservative, slow-changing forms. Yet recently key
elements of knowledge infrastructures, especially information technologies and
communication practices, have changed very rapidly, creating a growing sense of
disarray and disjuncture between established forms and new and exciting, but
unproven, possibilities. This report argues for the need to consider knowledge
infrastructures as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly
evolving elements. It poses a series of challenges and unresolved questions as
the basis for a new area of research, practice, and design. These include the
changing status of expertise as knowledge becomes more open to contestation
from all quarters, the shifting borders of tacit knowledge and common ground,
the unrecognized complexities of sharing data across disciplines and domains,
and massive shifts in publishing practices linked to new modes of knowledge
assessment. The new knowledge ecologies will necessarily involve
transformations of the research process: traditional institutions will adapt or
die; new forms will come into being.

All infrastructures embed social norms, relationships, and
ways of thinking, acting, and working. As a corollary, when they change,
authority, influence, and power are redistributed. Knowledge infrastructures
are no different; they create tensions and raise concerns that are best addressed
early and often. New kinds of knowledge work and workers displace old ones;
increased access for some may mean reduced access for others. As knowledge
infrastructures evolve, attending to the social relations both created and
broken by new modes may help societies reduce the negative distributional
consequences of change. For example, citizen science projects can be designed
in ways that maximize labor exploitation, on the one hand, or co-production and
engagement, on the other. Approaching these tensions and redistributive
consequences as a design opportunity — perhaps using the Scandinavian
participatory design movement as a model — could help to energize a new kind of
thinking about scale and structure in design.

The final section of this report reflects on what kinds of
research might best engage the question of knowledge infrastructures.
Participants emphasized that social scientists cannot remain simple bystanders
or critics of the current transformations, which will not be reversed; instead,
we need research practices that can help innovate, rethink, and rebuild. For
example, a long-time-scale, historically informed framework can help situate
our thinking by reminding us that infrastructural change normally takes decades
rather than years, and that very substantial social learning must take place
before the full benefits of new sociotechnical systems can manifest. Creating
and nourishing standards and mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research in
the qualitative social sciences, such as sustainable, accumulative, and
shareable qualitative databases, could contribute to this goal. Improvements in
qualitative data analysis software are urgently needed. New forms of
cyberscholarship, such as new modes of writing or what one participant called a
“knowledge zoom lens” for presenting qualitative evidence at any desired level
of detail, need support and creative thought. Building better interdisciplinary
collaborations across the natural and social sciences is an old goal, rarely
realized — but more crucial now than ever in the face of such problems as
climate change and biodiversity loss. A knowledge infrastructures perspective
on the study of scholarship will promote more sustained, collective progress in
research, design, and policy for 21st century scholarship.